The Upright Heart (15 page)

When it isn’t the boy, it is Wolf who cries out in the night. There is an image that returns to him. It is a vision of Olga mounting a cold gray stone covered in moss and Hebrew lettering, her skirts slipping around her waist, a baby emerging in slow motion, falling through a ring of stars that have descended to Earth. The stars hover closely to the ground, keeping the baby suspended in the air, reversing gravity so the baby can float just above the ground. The decayed letters lift from the stones and mingle with the stars. Olga drops to the ground and the baby comes to life with a cry, rising up into the night sky. Wolf wakes up in a cold sweat. He opens his eyes. The stars are below him, scattered on the floor.

Wolf tells the boy the story of his life, about his love affair with a Polish woman and his marriage to his cousin, Chaja. He says that he felt like he was killing both of them when he left Olga and the town of N, but in America he grew slowly to love his wife, even more so when their children were born. With each new life, an old burden was lifted. He came to understand that commitment could be a more powerful force than passion—something that his rabbi had assured him of when he was uncertain about marrying Chaja and going to America.

Wolf says that when he found out the truth about his parents’ fate, everything came rushing back to him. He could not stop thinking about Olga, about his mother and his father. Everything within him and beyond told him that he must go back home, if only to see. Nothing could have prepared Wolf for what he would feel. He knew, but he didn’t really know until now that everyone he had known and loved was gone. His hometown, which was once more than fifty percent Jewish, was now a place inhabited by half a world, half a heart, and, most terribly, only half a soul.

It is all a memory for me now, how I watch the stars gather to constellate me. One, two, three, they are coming, lifting me up into a new life.

“Pray for me,” my little feather laughs, and I find one last way to play a melody.

I like hearing Wolf tell his life story, but I cannot tell him mine. I am too afraid that if I do, everything good will go away. I did talk a little bit about the old man in the camp, but not about the camp itself. I erased that memory forever, and I work hard to keep it that way. I see my life as split into two parts, one before the pill; the other, after. Before there was life and then there was the war, and anything after is another kind of existence. Survival and magic, that’s how I like to explain what it’s like now. Magic is the moon and its blessings, magic is the pill, the beautiful world, and now Wolf and his dog. They made me know what it feels like to hug again. I feel the dog’s little heart beat next to mine. I have to admit
that the first time it happened, I cried. I sat in the toilet and wept into a towel, so as not to worry Wolf. He was still very weak and in bed. When I cried, I could feel that there is a river inside of me so strong that if I cry just a little bit more, then it will never stop flowing. So I stopped.

I can’t talk about what happened before. If I had a mother or a father or a sister or a brother I would talk, but they are gone, and I cannot speak of them at all. I don’t want to call out their names or bring them any closer to me. I don’t want to remind them of what they lost.

Wolf says he wants to go to Kazimierz to say a blessing for the dead. I tried to explain that the best place would be anywhere in Kraków, maybe on Kopiec Kosciuszki or beside the Wisła River. The land around Kraków is the closest thing he will find to a real family grave, but he feels certain about wanting to go to an actual Kirkut (cemetery). He is strict about which rules he must follow, and upset that there are so many he is unable to observe here. My father was that way, too.

This man is lucky that he has his new family in America, but here he is lost. He doesn’t have the pill, like I do, to bring him luck and make the world around him beautiful again. But he does have me, and I can help him. He has the little dog, and the dead man who sits by his bed and waits. Maybe he is here to protect him, and so am I.

Wolf tells me that after he recites the prayer for the dead he will travel home to Brooklyn, USA. He says that he wants to leave this place forever. Now Wolf knows that New York is his home. He believes that after he recites the prayer, just like he tried to do in his hometown of N, then maybe his family will rest in peace. I tell him that he is right, that it will help, but I don’t know if this is true. If Wolf could see all of those lingering spirits, like I do, then he would know that it isn’t so easy to free the dead. They cling to the earth like animals grasping to their mother for milk. I
shudder to think about it. When I remember having those feelings I begin to sink again, but thankfully I have the pill to lift me up from everything that wants to keep me down.

Maybe if I am lucky Wolf will bring me to America. Who knows? Anything is possible. Anything can happen. I believe that my pill makes dreams come true.

Tonight there will be a full moon. The sky will be beautiful and clear, and maybe there will even be a meteor shower. At least that’s what the lady in the corner shop told me, and I would like to believe her, even though she is always swiping the last of my hand-rolled cigarettes.

I dream about Rachelka. She is standing on top of the roof of our old school, singing a song she used to love. It is a Yiddish lullaby in which a mother sings to her crying child. It looks like Rachelka is singing it to the moon, but she is turned away from me, so it is difficult to tell. I am also standing on the roof, and when I look down at the school below, I see that the building is now made of nothing but a frame of fragile bones. Gone are the schoolroom floors, the ornate engraved walls, the beautiful paintings of surrounding landscapes. Only the old spiral staircase and a couple of rooms remain, one with a long row of single beds lined up against the wall.

The beams of the house shine in the bright moonlight, and when Rachelka sees me, she smiles. “Anna,” she says, and walks toward me along the tightrope that connects her side of the roof to mine. She takes both of my hands in hers, and I notice that she is smaller now, or maybe I have grown, which is sad for me to realize, because we were once almost the same height. She points to the places where we used to live, and to the parks where we once
played. She says that now all of them are gone. She gestures to the locked gate surrounding the schoolyard, and as I follow her hand, I see that outside the gate there are human figures writhing on the ground. They are moaning and crying, and when I look at her now, I feel afraid. But she holds my hand firmly and tells me to look one more time. She says that I can set them free. When I let go her hand I see that there is a ring of stars in the palm of my hand.

“Use it,” she says, pointing to the gate again.

There is a rhythm to everything, and sometimes souls must return to the earth. If your work was not done—but when is it ever done?—at least once, maybe four times, maybe even more, you begin again.

If I could stay suspended here, disembodied forever, I would. Then there would only be the dance of joy, the feather, the universe, my heart.

B
eneath the soot of this passageway there is a flower blooming in the dark. I saw it with my own eyes when we first came down to these tunnels. We marveled at the beauty of its petals and the strength of its thorns that pricked our fingers but never drew blood. In this tunnel darkness exceeds the depth of night. There is a texture to the pitch. As if once the sky existed without any stars, and that is where we stand now, waiting for the world to begin.

I walk in front of them. The footsteps of my men seem nonexistent, as they never make a sound, but they do rouse the dirt that has settled on the ground. Every inch of the tunnel is filled with sediment. The air is impenetrable at times, but we can still breathe, so we march on. One man asked if the footfall of a homeless man is heavier than that of someone who knows where he belongs. We all stop to think, but nobody knows the answer. Maybe it is even lighter, I say. Now there is nothing to hold us down.

“But we are going home, right?” demands Thomas, the thin young soldier, the one who is always crying out for his mother in the dark. “What about when we get there? Then we won’t be lost anymore.” I look back at the others. Nobody responds. We are coming to terms with the fact that we aren’t going to find our way there anymore.

Now it is time to move through the dust and reach the end of the tunnel. We walk solemnly. Our conversation has come to a halt. Occasionally there is a grunt or a song. Thomas loves to sing German songs that were popular in Berlin before the war. His favorite song is “Lili Marleen.” I used to feel sentimental when I heard that melody, like my heart was leaping from my chest into shattered halves remembering my sweetheart and my family, but now I just hear it and smile a little, like I am witnessing the last thread of my life, the final thing that will keep me tied to the world. Perhaps it is good that we are stuck in this tunnel, for in the next place there might not be any force of gravity to keep us down.

Now that we understand the truth about our lives, there is no longer any reason to cry. How did we discover everything packed into a tunnel underground? It is not as if there is a discarded match to be found or an old newspaper to tell us the truth about who won the war. But at some point we began to realize that we are among those who have died. Maybe it is the fact that these resistance tunnels seem to have no exit. Maybe it is because we noticed that our footfall no longer makes any sound. All at once our minds are coming together, recalling the quiet by the river, and that moment when a grenade exploded and time stopped for us. When winter lasted forever. Sometimes I wonder why that Polish man brought us down here. Did he know something we didn’t? Did he wish us harm or did he wish us well? He knew who we were and the truth about what had happened, and yet he told us nothing.

When the dark is so deep I have moments in which I am afraid. Will leaving you, my feather, mean that one of us will disappear? Is it not our love for one another that keeps us suspended here so perfectly? Without me here, what will you do? Will you wait for me
to return? When you see me again, many years from now, what if I am changed? How will you recognize me then? And if you don’t know who I am, how will you find your way to love me once more?

I step on a mound of dirt, and another explosion of dust rains over us, extinguishing our last little light.

“What will we do now?” Matthias asks, cleaning his face with an old dust rag.

“How am I supposed to know?” I answer, annoyed by my position of power. Death has not made me a subordinate yet.

Thomas kneels on the ground, his head in his hands. “Oh mama,” he moans. “I can’t take it anymore. I want to die! I cannot stand it!” He grabs a knife from Matthias’s belt, and with shaking hands, slits his own throat. Nothing happens. His suicide has no effect. He screams in horror, and though we hear his howl inside ourselves, on the outside world, in the caverns of this tunnel, it makes no sound. Hearing his cry feels like dying for the first time.

Thomas grabs onto Matthias’s boots and tugs at them. Matthias, who is quick to anger, bends over to slap him. Thomas cowers and cries, and the sound of his terror penetrates us all. Matthias grabs the collar of Thomas’s jacket and shakes him, as if he could rid him of his sadness by making him more afraid. Thomas holds the knife up in the air, his strained right hand fiercely gripping the ivory handle, now rocking and emitting an open-mouthed moan of lost desperation. We feel the reverberations inside our chests.

The anger drains from Matthias’s face. “That’s alright, kid,” he says, gently now, pulling the knife from Thomas’s taut hand. “That won’t help you anymore.” Matthias tucks the knife into his belt and kneels beside Thomas, who is now crying into the hollows of the earth, just like a child weeping into his pillow at night.

Matthias sighs. “We’ve got to keep on, Thomas. You’ll see. Everything will be better soon.” Thomas grabs onto Matthias’s legs as if they are his last chance for salvation. Matthias gives in and cradles Thomas’s lanky frame in his strong arms. He rocks him gently, petting his hair like a mother would her child, soothing him with all the kindness he can muster in the world.

How small is one tear? Not even a spider could bathe in its expanse, but his tears continue to pour forth and collect into a body of water, forming a miniature ocean that swells with the movement of his heart, a well that springs from him and moves upward, shifting airborne dust into a singular wall that separates my men from the end of the tunnel. His tears create an upward moving waterfall that rushes behind the wall of dust, casting raindrops of sediment in our direction. We are silent and amazed.

Thomas is the first to notice. A shiny button from his uniform deflects light onto his face. He looks up from the comfort of Matthias’s lap and sees something shining in the distance. It is subtle at first, but then it grows stronger, emitting a humming sound loud enough for us to turn in its direction. The light filters through the layers of water and dust, creating a dim glow that shifts across our bodies, illuminating us to ourselves. We are no longer hidden in the dark as we step through a cascade of dust and water and into the light. I am first. I lead my men. The river of tears washes all the dirt and soot from my uniform and body, and I emerge in the mouth of a cave that opens onto the night sky.

This feels nothing like being on the earth below. It is as if we are up in the sky, floating on a cloud. Stranger is the sense that this was our reality all along. Something kept us ignorant. My men come out in awe, one by one. As babies we came into this world and proved our force of life with a wailing cry. Now we stand in silence and there is nothing concrete to separate us from the spheres all around. With just one step, the heavens rise to meet us.
We are at one with this metallic atmosphere, these rotating planets in the night sky, our bodies drifting toward a crescent moon.